Make your mission + vision go beyond the BS

I may not have much faith in mission and vision statements, but let's not trash them entirely. 

The process of thinking through and writing mission and vision statements can be extremely helpful and clarifying.

And if you're going to slog through the introspective process you might as well end up with statements that are coherent and easily acted on. No ambiguous corporate-y jargon.

That's why I made my own worksheets. To help folks write statements that don't suck.

I started the process/toolkit when I was working in government because mission and vision statements were often required for new programs and committees. And I felt like a lot of time was spent (and wasted) writing them. 

In those experiences, it was never made clear what mission and vision statements are, how they're different from one another, and what they're supposed to even do. So a lot of the finished statements I saw didn't do much except meet a requirement. 

Obviously, nobody put a lot of faith in them.

And now that we're in a post-COVID world, with a lot of us working remote or hybrid, it looks like most non-government employees don't have a lot of faith in their mission and vision statements either.

Makes sense.

A statement on paper or on a website or in an employee manual is never going to make a huge difference.

But let's not give up on them. Yet.

✌️Rvw

PS. Sorry, the referenced article is a little old, I've been thinking about this for a long time. For the sake of this message, mission/vision/purpose are all used interchangeably. However, in the toolkit their definitions are VERY specific.